Hot Thermometer Charts in Excel - here is a cool way to do them

Let us learn a simple charting hack to create a thermo-meter chart in excel. This type of charts can be effective in communicating one data point, they can make excellent presentation slide or dashboard widget. What more, they are as simple to do as adding whipped cream to your latte. So lets begin:
1. First we [...]

Formatting numbers in excel - few tips

Reader Nikhil Shah asks in an email:
Dear Chandoo,
I have some Error In Excel sheet.
Problem :-
I have a locker number 01234 567890, in Excel it will be displayed as 01234 567890 with the space. However if it was entered as 01234567890, Excel will display it as 1234567890, without the leading zero. If the data has [...]

What the IF? - learn 6 cool things you can do with excel if() functions

Excel has various functions, including functions to calculate inverse cosine of a given value, to multiply 2 matrices, to estimate the internal rate of return. But, most of us(well, just me then..) use just about 5-6 functions to do our jobs. And IF functions are a majority of these, so it doesn’t harm to learn [...]

Creating in-cell bar charts / histograms in excel

Ever since writing the create in-cell pie charts in excel, I have been itching to find a simple enough method to do incell bar graphs. An in-cell bar would probably be more useful and cuter than an in-cell pie as it can instantly provide trending details. What more, these would probably look gorgeous when printed [...]

Open your favorite sites directly from Windows XP run dialog box

After seeing DI’s Open Your Favorite Websites Directly from Windows Vista Start post, I thought why not use Windows XP Run dialog box as a search box. So here is a simple trick that can enable you to open your favorite sites directly from XP’s run dialog box.
Using this trick you can type “g bbc” [...]

Create Cool Tag Clouds in Excel using VBA

I was toying with the idea of creating a tag cloud in excel - as a form of new visualization, this could be useful when you have medium amounts of data (eg: 50-300 rows) and you want to emphasize on what is important and what is not. I would imagine using a tag-cloud,

When you are [...]

Generate organization charts in excel - howto?

Here is a ridiculously simple workaround for those of you trying to generate an organization chart in excel:
Use google org. chart widget instead
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Open a new google docs spreadsheet (or work on the example organization chart [...]